ByCallie OettingerPublished: March 27, 2015

By veterans, for everyone.

Ernest Hemingway opened his introduction to the anthology Men At War (which he also edited) with:

This book will not tell you how to die. Some cheer-leaders of war can always get out a pamphlet telling the best way to go through that small but necessary business at the end. PM may have published it already in a special Sunday issue with pictures. They might even have it bound up as a companion piece to the issue I read in November 1941 entitled “How We Can Lick Japan in Sixty Days.”

No. This book will not tell you how to die. This book will tell you, though, how all men from the earliest times we know have fought and died. So when you have read it you will know that there are no worse things to be gone through than men have been through before.

When you read the account of Saint Louis the IX’s Crusade you will see that no expeditionary force can ever have to go through anything as bad as those men endured. We have only to fight as well as the men who stayed and fought at Shiloh. It is not necessary that we should fight better. There can be no such thing as better.

It was an anthology, he later wrote, that was for his sons:

This introduction is written by a man, who, having three sons to whom he is responsible in some ways for having brought them into this unspeakably balled-up world, does not feel in any way detached or impersonal about the entire present mess we live in. Therefore, be pleased to regard this introduction as absolutely personal rather than impersonal writing.

This book has been edited in order that those three boys, as they grow to an age where they can appreciate it and use it and will need it, can have the book that will contain truth about war as near as we can come by it, which was lacking to me when I needed it most. It will not replace experience. But it can prepare for and supplement experience. It can serve as a corrective after experience.

I re-read sections of Men At War, knowing my personal battles will never be Shiloh, but that as was his intention for his sons, I can find truth in the anthology — a perspective not my own.

In his book The Return, Dave Danelo tells a story of sitting on a delayed plane in 2005, having just finished a series of interviews with an Iraq war veteran whose friend died alongside him:

As our ground waiting time approached an hour, the man sitting to my left fumed and cursed. He needed a reroute; his schedule was destroyed; something awful (or so he thought) would befall him if immediate action didn’t happen. Unless I found a way off the plane, I was stuck with this guy. Finally, I cut him off in mid-rant. “You know,” I said, “things could be worse.”

It is not always appropriate for veterans to remind civilians they’ve been to war. Sometimes it can be obnoxious, arrogant, or rude. But in this case, I was calm. For me, that’s usually a good indicator to decide whether I should discuss my military identity.

I told my fulminating friend I thought it was a pretty good day when I wasn’t getting mortared and shot at. Besides the risk of our plane crashing, nothing bad would happen to us. We would get where we wanted to go. Everything would work out…. We talked on and off for another two hours. I don’t remember his name.

What I remember was that I gave him perspective. I reminded him of one of the many things my time in the Corps had taught me: do not worry too much about the things you can’t control.

Dave wrote The Return (which is also Black Irish Books’ new title) for veterans, just as Hemingway edited Men At War. However, where Hem wrote of “how all men from the earliest times we know have fought and died” Dave writes of how men have fought and returned. A book written by a veteran, for other veterans, which — also like Hem’s other writings — is just as valuable to civilians. More >>

BySteven Pressfield | Published: December 5, 2012

Human beings are built for adversity. Probably all extant species are, or they wouldn’t still be extant. But we humans in particular—lacking claws, fur, fangs, etc.—have needed the evolutionary edge of being designed for hard times.

Moby Dick and Ahab. The villain is the adversity faced by the hero.

Almost every great book or movie is about adversity. Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Hangover. The whole concept of “story,” of three-act structure, is about a protagonist confronting adversity. As Billy Wilder used to say, “Act One, get your hero up a tree; Act Two, throw stones at him; Act Three, get him down out of the tree.” Or Kurt Vonnegut: all stories boil down to three words, “Man in hole.”

Our American culture does a disservice to us as writers, artists, and entrepreneurs by holding up the model of easy living and instant gratification, money for nothing and chicks for free. We humans are not at our best in that world. We shine when times are tough.

For the writer, artist and entrepreneur there are two types of adversity: external and internal.

In every story, there’s a hero and a villain. But in the great stories, the villain is inside the hero. The protagonist is fighting a battle against himself. He is dueling with part of his nature. It’s one thing to slay the dragon, but another thing entirely to slay the dragon in our own minds.

The reason the concept of Resistance is so helpful, I suspect, is that it acknowledges the existence of the dragon in our own minds. Yes, it’s there. Yes, it’s real. And yes, it’s cunning and relentless and without pity.

Fortunately, we’re built for it. Fortunately, evolution has equipped us with tools to deal with it.

One of those tools is story.

If we’re writing a story or a movie or a video game, the first thing we should think about is the villain.

From what source does adversity come? We have to answer that.

How extreme should that adversity be? (Answer: as extreme as possible. The higher the stakes, the more involving the story.)

What is the nature of that adversity? The villain can’t be generic. The antagonist must be personal—specific to the hero’s fears and weaknesses. Ahab and Moby Dick, Jake Gittes and Noah Cross, Puss in Boots and Humpty Dumpty.

Ideally the antagonist—i.e., the source of adversity—should be a disowned limb of the protagonist—Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker—or a mental creation of the protagonist. One of the greatest of these was Forbidden Planet. Did you ever see that? In the climax, Walter Pidgeon was dueling with “monsters of the Id,” literally battling inside his own brain as the unseen villains were burning through foot-thick doors of Krell steel to kill him and his daughter and, believe it or not, Leslie Neilson.

The antagonist is the dark side of the protagonist. He’s who the hero could be and would be if he gave himself over to the sinister force inside him. When Alan Ladd as Shane guns down Jack Palance as Wilson, the black-clad gun-for-hire, he is facing the shadow side of himself.

Vampires and zombies are great antagonists because they represent our own selves gone bad. The reason we often empathize with certain vampires is that we see their good selves trapped inside their bad selves and struggling to get out.

Why do we need story? Why do we love great books and movies and videogames? Because these stories provide us with models for dealing with adversity. These heroes enact, in metaphorical form, the same dramas you and I are dealing with in our real lives.

Do we feel trapped? Give us a prison-break story.

Are we overwhelmed? Show us the little guy triumphing against all odds.

Are we tormented by the feeling that we’re living inauthentically? Show us Spiderman or Batman or Superman slipping into an alternate identity.

The Hero’s Journey, as Joseph Campbell has articulated it from myth and legend, is about adversity. It’s priceless for us storytellers because it isn’t made up or invented or theorized. It’s the raw evolutionary material of the human psyche. It’s the product of X million years of real life, up a tree, in the trenches, down in the shit.

We’ve been talking in this blog for the past couple of weeks about drafts of books and screenplays: what should we, as writers, focus on in successive drafts?

Focus on the villain. Take one pass and bear down on nothing but this. Adversity. Where is it coming from? Who is the villain and why is he the way he is? Does he reflect the dark side of the hero? If he doesn’t, we’d better take a good hard look at that.

And let’s not forget that we’re the hero too, facing the adversity of the work—Resistance, fear, self-doubt, self-sabotage, laziness, arrogance, impatience and overhaste (not to mention Second Act Problems)—and having to struggle every day against our own villains.

The story in the work is our story too, as is the adversity. Fortunately, we are built for it.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

The first time I became aware of the antagonist as the disowned limb of the protagonist was long before Star Wars in Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea. I remember my childhood self being completely overwhelmed by the ending, where the hero Ged must name his nemesis. Cogent advice for writing and life, as usual. May we all overcome Second Act lag.

Lon David

December 9, 2012 at 9:47 pm

Steven you’ve got to stop this crap! I’m inspired and depressed all at the same time here. I’m struggling to get out my little piece of crap ebook and feel even more insecure about it in the shadow of great writing. But I hear your voice in my head. Saying you’ve been there, fighting the same dragon too. Makes it even harder to just give up no matter how bad I want to. Not sure if I should thank you or curse you, but something tells me you know what I mean…

Three men sitting around a camp fire sharing war stories. The first pulls up the leg of his trousers to show the saw marks of a shark above both knees. The second opens his shirt to show the repeated slashes of a grizzly bear that almost disembowled him. The third … he sits quietly, sipping his beer and massaging his appendix scar. Which one is going to have the best story? Which one do you want to be? What are you prepared to do?